The Budget - A brief Rant

Okay, less than a day after it was unveiled I'm officially fed up of Labour and others moaning about the budget. When asked whether they want tax increases or spending cuts, people always say spending cuts. When asked what spending on services they want to cut, they say none of them. Osbourne, though he is an evil manchild, produced a tough but fair budget.

People didn't want tax increases, so there weren't any. What appeared instead were big spending cuts and a rise in VAT. People want to reduce the debt and have lower taxes and increased public spending at the same time. As Bill Maher said 'That's like thinking getting a hand job will clean the garage.' Someone had to act like a grownup, and Labour was kicking the ball downfield when they were in power to avoid any unpopularity (though why a bunch of international law breakers, supporters of war crimes and establishers of a modern police state would care about being unpopular I don't know), or risk losing the election. Though I am loathe to admit it, the Tories (and the Liberals) were the grownups we needed. So stop fucking moaning.


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Location:Sutton Court Rd,Hounslow,United Kingdom

Nintendo's Genius

Watching the E3 media briefings this week, it quickly comes apparent the kind of value that a history of game design has.

Sony, as a power in the video game world is only 15 or so years old. Microsoft is only 10. Nintendo is 25. The grandfather of modern console gaming is proving, in the HD age, why it is setting the agenda, not the power houses.

Nintendo has come a long way. It reinvented the wheel in the '80s with the Nintendo Entertainment System, a newfangled 'console' that was built solely to play games. It gave us Super Mario Brothers, a revelation. It gave us Zelda, the first computer game that actually allowed you to save your progress through the game.

These things were revelatory. It then simply upped the horsepower with the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (my first video games console) and produced some of the greatest classics in gaming history - Starfox, Super Metroid, Super Mario World.

But it was then that Sony reared its head and forced Nintendo to adapt. They game up with the first fully 3D game ever created; Super Mario 64, and followed it with games like Goldeneye 007 and Conker's Bad Fur Day, two other games that had a massive impact on the way we play games.

As using a console to play DVDs and act as a media centre became more popular, Nintendo seemed to start slipping behind. They produced the Gamecube to compete with the PS2 and original XBox. They announced that their unnamed followup would not be an HD console. It seemed as if they were losing their way.

No, they were reinventing the wheel again.

The Gamecube gave us the first wireless controller, the Wavebird. It's follow up is a little white box called the Wii.

Enough has been written about the Wii to explain it's revolutionary success. The sales figures speak for themselves (in Japan it outsells the PS3 and XBox 360 6:1). All there is to say that in the purported age of HD, online gaming, the little white box with sticks for controllers, no HDMI and fairly bog standard networking abilities is the market leader.

Which brings us to this week' E3. While Microsoft and Sony are showing off Kinect and Move, their own motion control toys, Nintendo debuted the 3DS. The world's first - and only - fully 3D gaming device (we can also note here that despite having half the horse power of the PSP the original Nintendo DS is the second best selling gaming system of all time, having sold over 129million units).

As Microsoft and Sony are playing catchup (and to be fair to them Microsoft's Kinect is pretty revolutionary) Nintendo is taking strides - once again - into the unknown.

They turned gaming on it's head with the NES, Gameboy and Nintendo 64, and then suffered as they waited for technology to catch up to their next great visions; the DS and Wii. Nintendo's lean years of 1998-2004 were spent biding their time, waiting for the right moment to do what they have always done best: not just lead the market, but invent it.

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BP

I'm hearing a lot about the drama surrounding BP at the moment; how their market value is dropping like a stone and their dividends are getting swept away.

Quite frankly, I don't care.

I cannot understand the obsession in the British media and amongst some of the British political class with defending Britain from what they deem to be obsessive attacks from America. Criticising BP is not anti-British. It's anti-planet destroying corporations. That corporation just happens to be based in the UK.

The people who are saying that Obama's attacks are risking British pensions are, quite frankly, idiots. Would these same people tell off a rape victim because several people happened to have money invested in the rapist?

It is the fault of the pension companies who invested such a massive amount of cash into a single company. If BP collapsed in Enron like circumstances would people be arguing about pensions then? No.

It's an effort to protect arguably one of the biggest British businesses from being regulated and punished by the Obama administration. BP deserves everything it gets. On average, the five other major oil companies average about 5-7 safety violations a year. BP has clocked up over 700. They are in a league of their own. They are environmental criminals and the people in charge deserve to be in prison.

Safety violation after safety violation. Environmental disaster after environmental disaster. And we keep letting them off because they pay a lot of tax. They are the modern East India Trading Company; a modern monolith that thinks it is too big to be stopped.

Pride goeth before a fall. And hopefully BP will fall hard.


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Location:Alwyn Ave,Hounslow,United Kingdom

Let's Try Mobile Blogging

So, I haven't updated this blog in months, mainly because I haven't written anything substantive in over a year, due to the myriad of other things that have been going on in my life over the past twelve months or so.

I'm going to try and re-engage though, and instead of blogging only lengthy articles I'm going to try and make this an expanded version of my Facebook/Twitter feed; in that I shall take that 120 character thought that I'm consigned to on there and expanded on it through here. We can all thank the iPad and iPhone for this.

I doubt these posts will reach anywhere near the length of my previous stuff, but I think it'll be interesting to produce short comments about whatever I feel like, no more than an A4 page or so and see how things go from there.

The revolution was yesterday.


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Location:Alwyn Ave,Hounslow,United Kingdom

Why I Am Supporting The Liberal Democrats

Over the past several weeks and months I have come to regard the British Election of 2010 as one of the most important of our time; certainly the most important that anyone in my generation has ever witnessed or been able to participate in. There are multiple reasons for this; the fact that the thirteen year Government of the Labour party has dramatically reshaped and redefined the social, economic and political landscape of this nation, the fact that the televised debates have done more to usurp the traditional media managed power of Fleet Street, and the fact that for the first time in almost a century, we are seeing a genuine three party race, between Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s incumbent Labour party, David Cameron’s newly invigorated Conservatives, and Nick Clegg’s dark horse Liberal Democrats.

I will be voting for the Liberal Democrats, for a number of reasons. I would like to explain why.

First things first: anyone that knows me knows that I am a passionate and staunch holder, supporter and defender of progressive, left wing, liberal values. It should come as no surprise then that I would choose to vote for a progressive, left wing party. What you may not know was that the first time I was old enough to vote, I voted for William Hague’s Conservatives in the 2001 General Election. I did not vote in the 2005 election. I do not believe in voting for a party because you always have. I think that is foolish and wrong. I believe in voting for who has the best policies.

So, Left Winger, Why Not Labour?

The Labour party, which has traditionally called itself the party of the left and the progressives of Britain will not be getting my vote for a number of reasons. Under Tony Blair, and later Gordon Brown, Labour became New Labour, and shifted dramatically to the right of politics. Out went the left wing values and in came corporatism, big Government, security states and spin.

For all the talk of papers like The Daily Mail and The Times of Labour having eroded the traditional values of Britain, the truth is that Labour have done more to uphold the concerns of the traditional supporters of the right than anyone could have imagined. The Government of Blair, now Brown, is not a progressive party. They have presided over a bloated Government full of corruption, lies, broken promises and pandering to big business. Though they are desperately trying to portray themselves as the party of progressives in order to take the thunder away from the Liberal Democrats, they are anything but that. Having resisted reform and progress (on a Governmental level) for over a decade, they are a party trying to conserve their established grip on power more than anyone else. They have had thirteen years to try and make things better, and while their contributions to a more equal society should no be overlooked, after the last five years of incompetent bumbling, it is time that they were shown the door.

The Labour Government was also the one that took us into the horribly misguided adventure in Iraq and Afghanistan, two wars that were stupid and unnecessary. These two wars - one which was bungled from the start and cannot be won, another that was opposed by the vast majority of the British electorate and was sold to Parliament on lies, deception, falsehoods, more deception, more lies and done so with a concerned look and smile on the face of the trickster that sold it - both at the behest of Labour’s masters in the United States, are reasons in themselves why no one should consider voting for the Labour party. The lies of the current Government have caused the deaths of hundreds of British soldiers and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and Afghans. They also broke international treaties and laws and threw over a century of British discipline and law on the battlefield out of the window by overseeing the illegal extradition, interrogation and even torture of foreign nationals deemed to be ‘enemy combatants’, and then trying to lie about it and cover it up. In the interim they may also have murdered Dr David Kelly, but thanks to their draconian security laws and obscene abuses of power, no one that is old enough to vote now will ever know what happened, as the records relating to the case have been sealed for the next 60 years. And all of this, this abandoning of the behavior that made this nation the envy of the world, was done for no good reason. This alone should disqualify anyone involved in that Government from receiving your vote.

Okay, What About The ‘New’ Conservative Party Then?

The support of the Tories for the Iraq war should also disqualify the majority of the Conservative party from receiving your vote, though there are a great number of other reasons why they are not deserving of Government.

I do not hide the fact that I vehemently dislike the nature of conservatism. I think that it holds us back, that it appeals to the base, self preservation nature in all of us, that it is inherently selfish and unconcerned with others. The current iteration of the Conservative party, under the leadership of David Cameron, has done a great many things to appear as if they they have changed from these core sets of beliefs. But they have not. They are the same Conservatives that they always been.

What Cameron proposes to do is take us back to the days of Thatcher. To take us back to the greed fueled days of the 1980s, the decade when the baby boomers oversaw the royal ruining of this country and the global economy. As seen in the last televised leaders debate, David Cameron ceaselessly ignored and dodged questions posed to him regarding his intent to cut the taxes of the richest 3’000 people in this country, his desire to cut public spending immediately and give tax breaks to big business, his intention to put a nonsensical cap on immigration and practically close British borders and his proposed withdrawal from Europe and intent to turn Britain into a semi-isolationist state in Europe. One only needs to look at the frequent trips of the Shadow Chancellor George Osbourne to the private yachts of several billionaires in the Mediterranean, many of whom would directly benefit from an isolationist Britain that favors big business. It doesn’t require much insight to put the pieces together.

Cameron, like the Tory party of old, has no interest in helping or supporting workers or the poor. He would like to break the unions like Thatcher once did, hand the rights and lives of employees over to their profit driven employers, cut tens of thousands of public sector jobs and force everyone to work for a year longer before they get the opportunity to retire. This forced extension of the age of retirement has nothing to do with allowing the elderly to put more money into their pension funds, but rather it’s purported aim is to reduce the national deficit. Though how working for private companies for another year would do that I am not sure.

You only have to look at the current Tory party to see how disingenuous they are about representing everyone and building a fair ‘Big Society’. They intend to keep and expand the surveillance state built by new Labour, but roll back the equal rights of millions of single parents and gay men and women across the country. As the Tories set about giving tax breaks to married couples, the middle finger is raised to those seeking a divorce, those who were never married or those who are gay.

One can also remember that the Tories’ same old virulent homophobia is as strong as ever. Though it is carefully hidden beneath a shiny veneer of tolerance, one only needs to look here (http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/jan/29/information-beautiful-gay-rights#zoomed-picture) and here (http://mygayvote.co.uk/) to see that this is a lie. Look at the recent scandals that have emerged in the press; Chris Grayling saying bed and breakfasts should be able to discriminate against homosexuals and Conservative MP Philippa Stroud, who founded a church to try and ‘cure’ gay men and women. One can also look at this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBlDfp85gP8) to see how Mr Cameron cannot even get his facts straight about the voting of his own MEPs in their support for the incredibly homophobic laws in Eastern Europe when challenged on it.

The more one scratches beneath the surface, the more one can see that nothing about the Conservative party has changed. They are the same old party they ever were.

So that leaves us with the Liberal Democrats, and why I choose to vote for them.

The Liberal Moment

The Liberal Democrats have long been the party of ‘Well I’d like to vote for them, but there’s no point. They won’t win.’ All that changed on April 15 this year, when Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg stole the first televised debate. My mind had been made up about voting for the Liberal Democrats for several weeks beforhande, but I was ecstatic to see Clegg dominate Cameron and Brown and show why a real progressive voice, free from the need to serve its backscratchers in the media or corporate bankrollers, is so desperately needed in this country. But it is not the performance of Clegg, or the prophetic financial ability of his proposed Chancellor Vince Cable that makes me vote for them. It is their policies.

To start, let’s clear up the most frequently misrepresented of their policies. First we have the immigration amnesty. This is not, as Brown, Cameron and many in the media have tried to spin it, an opening of Britain’s borders giving citizenship to anyone that wants to come in. The proposal is this; a one off, one time offer to illegal immigrants who have lived in this country for ten years or more, that they may take this opportunity to apply for citizenship. If they can prove that they can speak English and contribute to society, they will be granted (subject to a full background check) British citizenship.

This would take immigrants out of the hands of the people that may be hiding them, owning them or bankrolling them, and will allow them to contribute to the society that they have been hiding amongst for the last decade. This, in my opinion, is a far superior solution to Labour’s intention to use yet more surveillance to solve an out of control problem, or the Conservative plan to round up and throw out illegal immigrants and then close the borders. This would allow a Liberal Government to figure out roughly how many immigrants are in this country - illegally - and potentially create several hundred thousand new tax payers.

The second policy that is misrepresented, is the intention to review Trident. Brown, Cameron and the media have repeatedly portrayed this as a Liberal intention to scrap Britain’s nuclear deterrent. That is patently untrue. It is fear mongering. What the Liberal Democrats have proposed is a review of the vastly expensive program, a review that could save billions of pounds and reduce Britain’s over-bloated, Cold War style nuclear armament, in favor of tactical weapons with far more diverse use. Again, this is a smart move. Labour and the Conservatives would not take it because they know it could be spun to make them seem weak on defense. It is not. It will potentially save £100billion. It is smart.

Other policies I support are the reduction of classroom sizes and the additional assistance offered to underprivileged and struggling schoolchildren. I support the fair taxing of banks, the super-rich and large businesses. I support the increased Government regulation of industry. I support the intention to scrap tax on the first £10’000 anyone earns. I support their intention to stand as equals in the special relationship with America and not just roll over to U.S demands. I support their desired integration into Europe. I support their reworking of the prison service by making anyone that would be sentenced to 60 days in prison do community service projects, rather than bloat our already struggling jails. I support the linking of basic state pension and earnings. I support the breaking up of the banks and forcing them to lend again. I support the scrapping of university tuition fees for first time students. I support the scrapping of the £3billion Eurofighter program. I support the cutting of rail fairs. I support the proposal to reform the World Bank and IMF. I support the cancelation of 100% of the debt owed by the world’s poorest countries.

I support all these policies, but most of all I support the intention to reform the voting system. We do not, as the Tories claim, need a reduction in the number of MPs. We need to reform the system. Proportional representation is important. It is needed. Because of the current system, Labour - who almost lost the popular vote in 2005 - gained a sizeable number of seats and increased their power. Because of the current system, the Liberal Democrats may win the popular vote this election, but may only gain several dozen seats. The Conservatives and Labour have no interest in proportional representation, because it would break the stranglehold they both have on the current system. But the current system is unfair and broken. It leads to career politicians, it leads to things like the expenses scandal, it leads to the two party system that the majority of the populace have no faith in. It needs to be overhauled so things are fair.

That, more than anything, is what I believe the Liberal Democrats stand for and are offering. Fairness, and a chance to change the way things are. For too long the electorate has been scared of change, but dissatisfied with the way things are. Now is the chance to change this. Now is the chance to actually do something different. Something that benefits the many, not the few. Now is the time.

I am voting Liberal Democrat. I implore you to do the same.

On The Future Of Cinema

Three people. That’s what really got my juices flowing on this. Three people. Three of the most influential people in the recent history of the medium. In the most recent issue of Empire, pieces of George Lucas, James Cameron and Francis Coppola were featured. Three very different directors, three very different viewpoints. In a nutshell, the three articles encapsulate the crossroads that cinema now finds itself at.

 

In one corner of this triangle, we have George Lucas; the biggest one hit wonder in the history of any artistic medium. A revolutionary, a visionary and a destroyer of the childhoods of many modern day 20-40 year olds with his Star Wars prequel trilogy and his reanimation and subsequent defiling of the ghost of Indiana Jones. Mr Lucas’ take on the future of the medium is quite simple: ‘Within the next ten years, every movie will be a visual effects film.’ Or, if that doesn’t want to make you slap yourself in the face in anger enough, we have; ‘Art is technology. … All artists have bounced against the ceiling of technology.’ We can sum up Mr Lucas’ opinion in a few simple words: ‘Bigger and better technology is the future of cinema.’

 

In another corner of our triangle however, we have Francis Ford Coppola; a man responsible for three of the greatest films ever made (The Godfather, The Godfather Part II and Apocalypse Now), yet a man who, after completing his Vietnam masterpiece, pretty much never ascended to such dizzying heights of greatness ever again. Having not worked in a decade (a gap between 1997’s The Rainmaker and 2007’s Youth Without Youth), Coppola is returning this year with Tetro, a film with a budget of $15million, compared to Lucas’ most recent $185million flop ‘Indiana Jones IV: The Rape Of Your Childhood Memories’, could not be more at odds with his close friend’s view on cinema. ‘That we’re talking about now is the ‘big industry’ film – films that are packaged as a certain idea of action, and in many cases violence or thrills or mystery. These films aren’t expressions of the writer, but a compendium of ideas that could work as a blockbuster hit. That’ not Hollywood – it’s just wherever people want to make a lot of money.’ Indeed, Coppola is not interest in 3D or big budget or big events. He wants to make personal, intimate films about stories and people. He wants to shoot and write them beautifully. Whereas the future is purported to lie in one direction, one of the greatest directors of all time believes his own future, and possibly the appeal of the medium, lies squarely in the past.

 

And in the third corner - or perhaps it might be said – straddling the two above diametrically opposing viewpoints of the San Francisco friends above, is James Cameron. If ever the was a big budget director, Cameron is probably it. His cinematography reads like a litany of some of the greatest celebrated big budget films of all time; The Terminator, Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, True Lies and of course, the highest grossing film in history, Titanic. Cameron is currently working on Avatar, a film that allegedly promises to revolutionise the industry. Cameron firmly believes that 2D is dead, and eventually everything will be made in 3D, and yet in the interview, he has a very telling interesting ‘The key is to be in control of the technology, not let it control you.’ It appears, while Cameron certainly believes that the past is over, and that the future lies in 3D, he, unlike Mr Lucas, does not appear to have any interest in being a slave to it. He does not appear to hold any desire to make every film a technological marvel, rather he prefers to use the technology to accent the film and bring his vision to life, rather than have things in his films revolve around scenes that are there solely to use and show off whatever new gizmo it is he may be using.

 

So between the two polar opposite opinions of the San Francisco friends, there lies the Canadian. And while he leans towards George Lucas’ technological embrace, he holds back and holds firm towards the Coppola camp in that he soley wishes to tell stories. The difference is he fully embraces only the necessary technology to do so; he has no desire to use the tech for the sake of it. That, in my opinion, is the way forward, and that, in my opinion, is the only thing that will keep 3D technology away from being a fad (like it has been so many times in the past). The trick is to allow the technology to enhance your vision, to suck an audience into the believable world that you are surrounding them with.

 

This is where George Lucas has proved himself to be completely missing the point. A point which, in effect, he helped create. What George appears to have taken away from the success of his first three Star Wars films is that it was the technological wizardry that made them a success. He is - seemingly – incapable of understanding that it was the fact that this amazing technology that he pioneered fit like hand in glove in the telling of his epic space opera. It made space battles exciting, took you on a journey you had never experienced before and made you believe wholly in his vision. What he saw happening was people saying ‘Wow I’ve never seen that before! Wow look at that, that’s so cool!’ He didn’t get that the only reason that they’re bowled over is because they’re actually involved in the story. So when he remade the original three in the late ‘90s, and then went on to create the prequel trilogy, he didn’t realise that the simplicity of his initial story, the depth it offered to the viewer from its fairly black and white caricatures was what drew people in. He thought – and still thinks – that it was the whizzes the bangs and the booms that made people love it. What we ended up with was the most mishandled telling of a simple story ever written, albeit one that was technologically a masterpiece.

 

It’s funny to think that the man is so close with Francis Copolla, a man who is resolutely against the technological revolution; an artist who is quite happy to delve into the past in order to carve out his own future. As said, Cameron seems to straddle to two as the sensible influence, yet it remains to be seen whether this new wave of cinema tech will be embraced by audiences. Remember, it was not just whizzes and bangs in Star Wars that made people love it; they had already seen elements like that in other movies for almost a decade prior. It was the stories that the first new wave of tech was grafted onto that helped them be successful, not the tech itself. Up until the late ‘90s it was a tool used to enhance a story. But as it became easier to manipulate, it became something that could supplement, rather than accentuate, the story itself. The result is the wave of films we have seen since around 2002-2003 which have relied so heavily on CGI that their soul has been sucked from the screen (in most cases they didn’t even have a story). It remains to be seen whether there are more exceptional filmmakers like James Cameron out there that understand that cinema has always been about great stories bought to life in a way you could never see in reality or a live setting, rather than being the technological exercise that George Lucas and his techno-ilk wish to doom its future to.

Why Are People Happy To Let Crooks Run Their Own Trial?

There is an ongoing roar at the moment, certainly it exists within the hallowed halls of Fleet Street in our Oh so unbiased news media, but interestingly – for once – it actually seems to be reflected amongst the people that live in this country as well. The matter is that of the expenses of our MPs. On and on and on this debacle has been going, and countless dozens of headlines have cropped up to expose the abuse of the system; the most recent being the revelation that the Labour peer Baroness Uddin claimed £100’000 of expenses on a flat that she never even furnished, that she claimed was her main residence in order to claim almost £30’000 a year in accommodation expenses from the House of Lords. Her actual main residence was actually 4 miles away from Parliament.

 

Now, don’t get me wrong, everyone fiddles their expenses when they can (if they’re lucky enough to be permitted expenses). Everyone, now and again, will happily charge something through their company when it doesn’t really have much business being charged there. I have no real beef with MPs doing that. Is it annoying that they’re doing it with my tax dollars? Yeah, I guess it is. But do I really care? No. Because everyone would do it if they could. (We do, in fact, see another example of the empty hearted ‘moral outrage’ that rattles so frequently through our news media, expressing disbelief and outrages at MPs playing fast and loose with their expenses, despite knowing damn well that they would do the same if they were in such a position (and despite many of them already doing so)).

 

No, what irks me on this issue, what is kind of being skipped over and ignored by the mainstream press, and is thus not being communicated to the (and I use the term loosely as always) ‘great’ British people, is the enquiries that our lame duck Prime Minister is having done into MPs expenses. We are due to see a report into MPs expenses claims and allowances published this summer, and who is writing this report? The Commons Standards Committee. And who makes up this publishing body? Members of Parliament.

 

So yes, MPs are due to be writing a penetrating report critiquing their use and possible abuse of expenses, the conclusion of which could adversely affect their allowances. They’re being asked to regulate themselves. And, in turn, they are going to be given permission to censor themselves. The MPs are going to be allowed to censor ‘sensitive’ information, such as the names of hotels, destinations of taxis, names of shops and any correspondence with parliamentary officials. Basically, all the really important stuff.

 

So let’s look this objectively, what we lowly serfs will be allowed to see, is a claim for, say, £1000. We will be able to see the date of the claim, what was claimed for and the identity of suppliers only for office goods. So, in short, we’re being told that there will be total transparency on this, total accountability, and yet the people that will be compiling this report will be the people that it will affect directly, and then they will be given total free reign to cover up that which they don’t want to be known.

 

Apparently, there have been several MPs on the backbench who were on ‘suicide watch’, recently, because of what might end up being revealed.  There have been rumours floating that a pair of MPs are fearful that their extramarital affairs will be exposed by double claims for their hotel rooms. But, thankfully for them, they will be allowed to cover their oily, duplicitous little backsides, because their friends who are compiling this report will allow them to do so.

 

What is most annoying about this whole debacle is that no one is really that outraged about this. The MPs, while coming under rightful fire for abusing their expenses, are doing every damn thing they can to continue to protect themselves. They have got their hand caught in the cookie jar, and instead of just licking their wounds and taking the punishment they rightly had coming to them, they continue trying to protect themselves and fuck over their employers (US), while at the same time having the nerve to lecture the rest of the country about fiscal and economic responsibility and to lecture bankers that their reckless spending has to stop. Their hypocrisy and two faced double standards shine through again and again and again. And what is most frustrating is that this particular caveat is being overlooked by a lot of people in favour of the more salacious examples of expense abuse. The expense abuse as a headline is all fine and well, but the real news here is that they are getting away with continued abuse of the system. Bankers do not have this luxury, social services do not have this luxury, but no one is calling out the elected Members of the British Parliament on their claiming, nay, snatching of this luxury for themselves. That is what to be outraged about, and that is what the media is sliding away from.

 

We should be, as usual, demanding and expecting better from both our media and our politicians. But, then again, what’s new.